Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Effective
teaching is one of my primary goals in teaching yoga. The various Alignment
Yoga Teacher Training programs focus on helping teachers-in-training become
good teachers… Who just happen to teach yoga.

Sadly, the
focus in much of the yoga teacher-training world is on the flash and dazzle of
yoga: doing ever-deeper poses, or pushing students into emotional release.
While there is a time and a place for both of these skills, I think we’d all be
better off if we spent more time focusing on the fundamentals of effective
teaching.

I can clearly
remember the first time I recognized that I was in the presence of a very
effective teacher. I was in the third grade at Desert Shadows Elementary School
in Scottsdale, Arizona.

My usual
classroom teacher announced that the principal, Muriel Rickard, would be coming
into the classroom to teach us the 9’s of our multiplication tables. I was a
pretty sorry student of multiplication tables, as memorizing isn’t one of my
great strengths. In addition to being pretty underwhelmed by the prospect of more
memorizing, I was also scared by the prospect of the principal, the holder of
ultimate authority, spending much time in our classroom.

Despite my
misgivings, I found Ms. Rickard to be absolutely enthralling. She walked
confidently into the classroom, and immediately connected with the students in
a warm-hearted and engaging way. To this day, I am amazed by her capacity to
connect with students so quickly and in such a seemingly effortless way.

Of course, the
9’s of the multiplication tables have their own intriguing patterns. I still
remember some of those details, but what I most clearly remember was watching
Ms. Rickard teach. As a third-grader I thought to myself, that’s why she’s
the principal – she’s the best teacher!

Up until that
point, I categorized teachers as either nice or not nice. I’d
never considered pedagogy in the least. But from that moment onward, I began to
pay attention to how teachers taught, perhaps even at the expense of listening
to what they were teaching.

Thanks to Ms.
Rickard, way back in 1975, for opening my eyes to the world of teaching.
And a big thank you to all the teachers in the intervening years who’ve helped
me see what I didn’t know that I didn’t know, and then showed me how to use the
tools to continue discovering.

Welcome to the Alignment Yoga blog, where you'll find yoga articles, videos and audio presentations by Scott Anderson, with an emphasis on how to avoid common mistakes we make doing this ancient practice with our Western bodies and minds.